Quality Assurance ?
Quality Assurance in terms of Web Design is the assurance that when you buy a website from AltStudio you are getting a quality product that is built using web standards, is accessible and has passed our rigourous testing criteria.
How Does It Benefit Your Business?
- An accessible website with validated code and links downloads faster. Complying to Web Standards and best practices ensures lightweight and efficient code. By keeping the file size of your website's code to a minimum, your clients see fast load times.
- A standards-based websites take less time to build and maintain. This saves you time and money
- Its your legal obligation! A website is regarded as a service and the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against disabled people. Almost one in five Australians have a disability, and the proportion is growing. Adhering to accessibility regulations ensures that even users with disabilities can use your website.
- An accessible, standards-based website tends to gain higher ranking with the search engines.
- Building sites to universally recognised standards will ensure that the site displays consistently across a range of browsers. Whether your clients use a PC or a Mac, they can access your web site.
AltStudio Quality Assurance Program
We at AltStudio Web Design believe very strongly in producing validated, standards compliant code for websites. Our quality assurance procedures ensure our clients have a web presence with the maximum impact on the world wide web by increasing a sites usability and performance. At AltStudio, we have implemented a website quality assurance process that means no site goes live unless each and every page passes a rigorous set of tests to ensure they meet a very high minimum requirement.
Prior to the launch of any new web project, the site is checked to ensure that
- All links within the site work correctly (Link Validation)
- XHTML/HTML validates correctly
- CSS validates correctly
- There are no typographical and/or spelling errors in the text
- Contact and inquiry forms operate correctly
- The site displays correctly on all major operating systems (Windows Internet Explorer 6+, Windows Firefox, Mac Safari and Mac Firefox) and monitor sizes.
When all tests have been passed, AltStudio issues each client with a Quality Assurance Certificate and proceeds with launching the website.
Because we feel so strongly about Quality Assurance in our websites, we have developed the AltStudio Quality Assurance (QA) Program.
Why is Quality Assurance Important for your company?
Under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), businesses that have a website have an obligation to ensure that their website is accessible to people with disabilities. A website is a service and the DDA makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against disabled people. Almost one in five Australians have a disability, and the proportion is growing.
Many common disabilities affect peoples ability to view websites. For instance:
- Colour blindness, which in some forms can affect over 10% of men, can seriously affect how people view websites if colours have not been chosen carefully
- Australian's population is ageing. In 2004, 50% of people aged 65 and over, living in private dwellings had a disability (ABS, 2004). Many disabilties, such as vision impairment and even arthritis can affect how easily a person can access information via the internet.
For further reading on the DDA and how it applies to the web, please go to http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html
By meeting your DDA obligations, you are reducing the risk that your company may be sued for non-compliance. Increasing the accessibility of your website ensures that more people are able to access your website and opens you to markets that may never have been able to access your products before.
Outside of these reasons, an accessible website with validated code and links tends to rank higher with search engines and downloads faster.
